Inter(national) Geographic (National Geographic Channel)

Member Name: bruffyboy

Product:	National Geographic Channel
Date:	30/10/09 (22 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: beautiful pics

Disadvantages: commentary bias

National Geographic, to me, means piles of old magazines with yellow bordered covers. They littered my uncle's house, and he was a hunter. Think Nat Geo, and you're thinking animals and pretty photos, but what about the TV channel?

Nat Geo is a subscription channel that contains non-fiction documentaries non-stop. Whilst you may think they would all be about animals, they also cover science, culture and history.

At its best, this channel showcases some truly phenomenal documentaries about nature. We often don't realize, but these docs are the work of years and years of work, and to watch them is to benefit from someone else's hard work. Visually, they are stunning. All the areas of the world, along with all animals are covered, and it's like being there yourself. When you compare this to the traditional BBC experience, where you may have half a dozen shows a year, this channel really does excel.

One thing that annoys me is the voice-over work on the documentaries. I find it so subjective that it just does my head in! Often, the voice-over promotes a certain ideology, and it gets in the way of just enjoying the visuals (for me at least). For example, a nature show may be showing something truly amazing, such as fish which only live in one lake in the whole world, then the voice-over will start talking about evolution. These shows seem to forget evolution is just a theory, and one many people (me included) don't agree with, yet they chant it out like it's gospel.

Certain documentaries are almost like travel shows, highlighting the most amazing places in the world. There is one argument that these are bad for us, as they stop us from discovering anything ourselves, but for me they are often inspiring of future travel.

All in all, a channel that showcases some beautiful visuals, and is clearly the result of a lot of work, but the objective narration sometimes puts me off.

Summary: do it